Drowning of Stephan Jones (3 page)

From the far side of the store, his son thoughtfully took in his dad’s words. Removing his hand from the pocket of his chinos, he fashioned a pretend gun with his right hand, closed one blue eye as though taking deadly aim through a gunsight, and to nobody in particular, announced with an air of finality, “Bang! You’re dead! And bang! You’re dead, too.”

Chapter 3

T
HE PACE OF
Harris’s Handy Hardware Store was returning to something that might pass for normal, but Carla didn’t feel one bit normal. Her emotions were spinning faster than last April’s cyclone, the one that whipped the roof right off Clyde Thompson’s video store.

There were slivers of a moment here and slivers of a moment there when she was dead certain she felt one thing, but the very next instant, she’d be equally convinced that what she was feeling was the exact opposite! Like, for example, when she was sure that she felt blind rage that her “friend” deceived her by acting supremely masculine, but
wasn’t.
But in the next tidbit of an instant, she thought that, except for this weird notion of his to love one of his own sex, maybe he was just as much a male as any other guy. Male? Female? Don’t you have to be one thing or the other? If you’re not one thing then don’t you definitely have to be the other? At this point, the only thing that she was convinced of was her own confusion.

She was sure of sadness at the way the men had been publicly ridiculed. Why, oh why would the lady and Mr. Harris want to talk that ugly way to living, breathing human beings? Did they only feel big by making others feel small? Or were they blinded by their own self-righteousness?

There was something else engraved on her heart, and that was a sense of disappointment in herself. Somehow, out in the cold in front of the hardware store he had recognized her trepidation. He’d risked rejection to whisper encouragement in her ear. He had come to her rescue when she was alone. But she hadn’t come to his. Why hadn’t she done something, said anything, to help them? One thing she knew for sure—she was completely unworthy of being called Judith Wayland’s daughter. But she wasn’t involved, so what could she really do? But
Carla knew her mother would never have to ask that question. Judith seemed to have come into this world knowing exactly what she should do and why she should do it. No, Judith Wayland would never sit on her hands, or on her heart, while witnessing an injustice.

Carla felt her face flush and guessed that her temperature was soaring to heights that no ordinary thermometer could ever hope to follow.

Suddenly Carla snatched up the package of miniature Christmas tree lights and headed for the cashier’s counter as though it were her express ticket out of there. How good the fresh air would feel, cooling the temperature that raged within her body. As she slid the package across the counter, she noticed that the brawny merchant’s complexion had pretty much returned to its normal color. “Well, well, who are you buying the lights for, Carla?” He sounded surprisingly good-natured and calm now.

The answer to his question seemed clearly self-evident, and Carla wondered if he wasn’t trying to redeem his reputation as a good guy after the inhuman way he’d treated those men. More likely, it was just his idea of small talk. “It’s for us, Mother and me.” But when that didn’t seem to entirely satisfy him, she felt called upon to add, “For our Christmas tree.”

Her predictable answer appeared to stun the merchant. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle—your momma know what you’re doing?”

Could there be something about Christmas lights that she didn’t understand? she wondered. Could they be a little dangerous, maybe needing special handling, a little like fireworks? “Well, yes sir,” she answered, feeling vaguely humiliated. She handed the merchant a neatly folded ten-dollar bill. “This is the money my mother gave me to buy Christmas tree decorations.”

Mr. Harris cocked his large head to one side as though he
were checking to make sure she was telling the truth. “You know something? That surprises me, sugar, it really does—especially when you take into account all the whooping and hollering your mother did a couple of years back when Rachetville tried putting our own creche in front of our own city hall! And on our town’s very own property at that! Well, behavior like that might be just the ticket with some of those free-loading, nuts-and-berries free spirits in Parson Springs, but that kind of stuff doesn’t go in this town!”

Carla’s head drooped against her chest the way the challenger’s did when the champ had landed his killer punch against the poor guy’s midsection in Saturday night’s Television Fight of the Week. But unlike the luckless challenger, who remained flat-out on the canvas, her head rose slowly up, up, up again, almost level with Mr. Harris’s eyes.

Sticking up for Judith had, over the years, become almost automatic. Never, never pleasurable, but still and all, automatic. “What my mother attempted to do,” she explained slowly, giving each word a kind of resonating importance, “was to fight for the Constitution of the United States of America, and for what it says in there about the separation of church and state.”

“You gotta be kidding! Think
our
Constitution needs help from
your
mother? Well, I don’t! I fought for our country, risked my life over in Korea—so I ought to know!”

Carla stared into Mr. Harris’s eyes just so he’d understand that he wasn’t dealing with some little lightweight nothing that could oh-so-easily be tossed and thrown by the first gust of wind that came her way. “Well, in her own way, I believe Mother has fought for this country, too. She’s fought for the right of everybody to choose their own beliefs even if they’re different from your beliefs or mine.”

Mr. Harris threw the change upon the counter. Carla, careful not to appear as though she were in flight, picked it up and
with her head held high walked out of the store. Maybe the merchant understood now what he hadn’t understood before. Nobody can get away with talking bad about her mom! Not even Andy Harris’s daddy.

In a town where change is suspect, Rachetville’s chief librarian, Carla’s mother Judith Wayland, had come in for more than her share of suspicion. More than anyone else, Carla wished that it just wasn’t so. While publicly she would spring to her mother’s defense at any provocation, privately—very privately—she was embarrassed and even angry that her mother couldn’t pretty much share the same general opinions as everybody else. Or at the very least, why couldn’t she keep opinions that were not ordinary everyday opinions to herself?

After all, if they were good enough for everybody else, why couldn’t they be good enough for Judith? Her different thinking was not just a small matter, because being different caused problems. At last month’s town meeting, Mrs. Hilda Wooten stood up and suggested: “Our public library could easily save some of the town’s hard-earned money and be patriotic both at once—killing two birds with one stone, so to speak. The town library should make it a sworn policy not to buy any books, newspapers, or magazines that are critical of our country, our religion, or our American way.”

The ringing applause for Mrs. Wooten hadn’t entirely died down when Carla’s mother was on her feet. First she quoted a poet from long ago comparing a public library to an evergreen tree because it went on blossoming all year long, but quoting that poet wasn’t what got folks so upset. It was what she said next that caused all the trouble: “... as your town’s chief librarian, I cannot in good conscience agree that we have too many books or periodicals that are critical of religion or government. The fact of the matter is that we have too few. If we lose our right to criticize, the next thing we’ll lose is our right to be free. You see, in my opinion, it is the business of a library
to
help make the world safe for diversity
.”

Judith’s remarks were followed by a silence so cold and hard that it would have taken a chain saw to cut through it. A few people from the back of the room anonymously booed. When Hilda Wooten stood up to respond to Judith, she received an honest-to-goodness standing ovation! And that was even
before
she spoke what came to be much-quoted soul-stirring words: “It would be far better for both our community and for our country, Mrs. Wayland, if you’d forget about that diversity nonsense and instead use your God-given talents to help make the world
ripe for Christianity
.”

Carla had grown up listening to her mother’s sometimes funny and often depressing stories about how she barely survived the narrow mental and emotional confines of St. Joseph’s Academy of Lafayette, Louisiana. More than once, the girl had been overcome with the need to protect her mother from the indignities of times past. If only she could, Carla would have willingly hurled herself backward through space and time to save her mother from nuns who struggled mightily to press Judith’s free and far-ranging spirit into molds that bruised and bound.

Back in the middle 1960s when Judith would confide to her own mother the indignities that Sister Mary Staten, in particular, would subject the students to particularly the dumber boys—her mother would only make those little
tsk tsk
tsking sounds. But when the girl wouldn’t take heed of the
tsks
to change the subject, then her distressed mother would begin pleading: “Stop it this minute! Stop talking badly about the nuns! Don’t you know they can’t do wrong because they’re married to Jesus?”

Carla loved her mother, and in part because of so many long-ago anecdotes like these, she more than most daughters understood her mother. Understanding someone else’s pain may not be all there is to love, but surely it’s got to be a part of love.

Judith would stand up and speak out for things that others were against, and she was often absolutely opposed to what others favored. She was, for example,
for
sex education but opposed to Bible reading in the schools. She was
for
a woman’s right to an abortion, but she was
against
the way the largest local employer, Tyson Chicken, discarded poultry entrails.

All you had to do was open your ears and listen when Judith Wayland’s name popped up, and you’d see that suddenly there’d be an awful lot of
yeah buts
injected into the conversation. Carla admired her mother for her courage and yet she sometimes longed for a different kind of a mother, one that wasn’t controversial at all.

Chapter 4

A
CHEER AS
mighty as it was spontaneous bounced throughout Rachetville High at three-fifteen in the afternoon that began the nine days of Christmas holidays! As Carla and Debby Packard, her best friend ever since they shared a playpen together, headed quickly for the west door, Carla heard her name ricocheting against the plaster walls.

Andy Harris was galloping up to them. “Hey, Carla, hey, where you running off to?”

“Oh, Andy, hi,” she said, thrilled and surprised that he was at long last seeking her out. At the same time she was disappointed in herself that after wishing and waiting for months for this wondrous event to happen, the best she could come up with was “Hi, Andy.” Wouldn’t she have given her entire kingdom for some perky little sophisticated zinger of a response?

She was interested in Andy not merely because he was cute and good-looking—although, the good Lord knows, he sure
was
cute and good-looking! It was all really a little strange, especially to Carla, exactly the way her feelings for Andy ignited.

One bright Sunday morning in late summer, Carla caught sight of the Harris family, Bibles in hand, hurrying across Grove Street. Mr. and Mrs. Harris, along with their two grammar school daughters and Andy, were on their way to services at the Rachetville Baptist Church.

Their clothes were stylish enough to command attention and maybe even respect anywhere—New York, Boston—anywhere! Mr. Harris especially looked successful enough to have his picture plastered across the jacket of one of those How-to-Make-a-Million-Bucks-in-Your-Spare-Time books.

Although Carla still felt annoyed with Mr. Harris’s inexcusable actions toward the men in the store, as well as his digs
against her mother, she was (in spite of herself) deeply drawn to this seemingly all-American, perfect-looking family. She had done what she had to do—stick up for her mother—but her admiration for the merchant existed in a way she couldn’t deny.

For one thing, he was totally unlike Roy Wayland, the father that she had never met. Mr. Harris stuck with his family, working hard and providing well for them. And what a relief it must be when your beliefs seem to custom fit those of the community. Maybe most appealing of all to Carla was the fact that the Harris family so beautifully blended into this town. Never would a person connected by blood or marriage to the Harrises ever know what it was to feel like an outcast!

Then there was Mrs. Harris. Elna Harris was so sweet and pretty and nice that she just wouldn’t know how to upset anybody. Probably not even if she tried because she was a true-blue Southern lady—taught to flatter and charm men, never to challenge them. Which was fine with Elna because all her ideas had already been handed down to her from everybody else.

The Harris children included two kid sisters and Andy—handsome Andy with chin high and carrying his very own leather-bound Bible. Although he was still young, a person could just tell that he was someday going to make a name, a very big name, for himself!

That’s when Carla was overwhelmed with the sense that she didn’t want to be publicly connected with her controversial mother. She needed to belong to a handsome and respectable family. And she needed it
now
!

At the precise moment of that realization, she grasped what all her old, unnamed, and as yet unfaced yearnings were all about. But at the next moment, when she thought of her own mother’s cheerful sacrifices on her behalf, she felt distinctly disloyal. She knew she should feel ashamed of herself—and
she did feel smudged with shame because nobody, absolutely nobody, could have done more, would have done more to raise a daughter alone than Judith Wayland.